Category: Using Heyoya

Managing an online store is tough. The competition is massive and the online market is increasingly crowded. Major retailers dominate the scene (think Amazon, Alibaba and eBay) and if you are a small store starting out it’s challenging trying to find your space on large marketplaces like Etsy or eBay. So how can you find your niche and work to improve both your conversion rates and your sales? There is no simple answer but the tips below are a good start.

This is arguably the most important point for making sure an online business succeeds. With a crowded arena it is incredibly important to figure out who you are and why your offering stands out. Doug Hall of Eureka Ranch has distilled this into 3 laws of business: 1) Overt benefit; 2) Real Reason to Believe; 3) Dramatic Difference. Overt benefit basically means focusing on the major benefit your customer can gain from your product or service. It’s no good falling in love with a cool design or great technology. It’s important to stay benefit focused and to make sure that it is obvious so your customers can easily understand your business’s value.

If you are trying to grow your business it’s likely that you’ve spent a good deal of your time on marketing. It’s also pretty likely that a large proportion of that time has been designated to content marketing. Creating the right content – content that is unique, creative, on brand and targeted in just the right way – can give your business a huge boost and help keep your users stay engaged. But how can you take content that is “ok” or “good” and transform it into content that is truly “great”. We’ve prepared a few key tips below.

Build up creativity through consistency and planning

It might not sound super inspiring but being consistent is absolutely essential. Your content reflects your brand and keeping things on brand means keeping them consistent across platforms and in terms of timing. It’s no good having super creative frequent content one week and then badly written sparse content the next. So start by putting together a plan. Creativity doesn’t need to be a Eureka moment or an off-the-cuff brainstorm, it can actually be something you build up and structure. For some great advice about how to do that take a look at this video from Craig Wynett, Chief Innovation Officer at P&G.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/4855136300

Don’t do it alone

You don’t need to do everything on your own. One great way to widen your pool of content is to introduce “guest” or “expert” writers. Staying true to your brand while showing different perspectives can really help to enrich your content. And don’t forget – content is not just what comes from your brand directly. It includes articles about your business (which can be easily shared and promoted across platforms) and perhaps even more importantly, it includes everything your users say about you.

How is tech going to change and grow in near future and what will the future of tech look like in ten or twenty years? According to Jeff Pulver, VOIP expert, the future will look a lot more like Star Trek then we might expect. In a recent talk he described typing and interacting with apps the way we do in 2017 as something that will soon become obsolete. So what will our digital interactions look like? Well, as VR and AR gain technological prowess and voice analytics improve; the future looks set to look like a lot like science fiction. If you’ve watched Star Trek then you are familiar with the concept of a ship that works primarily through voice commands and a “holodeck” where crewmembers have immersive VR experiences. We might not be ready for intergalactic space flight quite yet, but the digital interactions are already moving in this direction.

Many of the gadgets seen on episodes of Star Trek already exist. We already have tablet computers, universal translator apps and more. But the future looks set to combine many of today’s emerging technologies for a more intuitive and interactive digital experience. Gesture technology and voice technology point the way towards control decks and control hubs that can be commanded much as the Captains of the Enterprise commanded theirs. And if it sounds like nothing but science fiction to you, just check out RoomE’s hi-tech voice and motion controls. Today this kind of control panel is a one off, lab-based experiment, but soon enough we can expect to see these kinds of digital interfaces in our homes and workplaces.

There are so many ways to advertise a business digitally. From sponsored content to banner ads, native advertising and social media campaigns, businesses’ biggest challenge is figuring out which channels are best and how to target users through them in the most effective way. In a world that is crowded with digital advertising and content options, UGC stands out as something far more organic and authentic. Rather than “hearing” the voice of a brand explain why a service or product is best, UGC is much closer to receiving a personal recommendation from a friend or a relative, and this feeling of UGC being both personal and authentic makes it a very powerful tool to increase sales.

If you are looking to monetize your website or blog, then there are so many different types of advertisements to choose from. You can run paid banner ads, popups, retargeting email campaigns through your website or blog. You can run ads, boosted content or sponsored stories across social media. You can create sponsored content in the form of articles or guest blogs, and the list goes on. But one mode of advertising really stands out – native advertising.

You probably know about big data. It has been heralded as a game-changing tool and has already transformed many aspects of many industries. According to Forbes, big data is a collection of data from traditional and digital sources inside and outside your company that represents a source for ongoing discovery and analysis. There are different types of big data and it’s not just the realms of the digital world that count – offline interactions happening in large volumes also count. Forbes splits the field into 2 major areas – unstructured and multi-structured data. The former cannot easily be organized or interpreted by algorithms or databases (think social media posts), and the latter refers to interactions between people and machines (a wide range of interactions including web apps and social networks). But what does all this mean for advertising?

With more data at our disposal and better ways of storing and analyzing what we have, big data looks set to be a game changer for advertising. So what is changing? Well it’s not necessarily how we advertise that will change, but rather the insights informing advertising decisions will be stronger and smarter. Big data can help us get better at understanding customers. This means better honing messages with predictive analytics and gaining new insights on the way customers interact with advertising. Big data isn’t the next generation of advertising, but rather a tool that can help us do things better.

It’s 2017 and we are being constantly bombarded by ads. We see a pop up on every page we visit, there are banner ads on the sides of the blogs we read. When we log onto social media a large proportion of what we see is sponsored, and when we search Google the first few results are always advertisements. At a certain point we start to block out the advertising “noise”. There’s too much of it and a lot of it just isn’t relevant to our lives.

In recent years, ad campaigns have focused on targeting the “right” segment of users. Using this logic, the total group of potential customers of any business is split up into different segments often based on demographic or psychographic qualities. Take Instagram for example. If you want to create a campaign you can pick out your target segment by choosing their age, gender, location and up to 10 interests. On Facebook you can go into even greater depth in terms of interests but the overall logic is the same. Once a segment is chosen, material is targeted specifically towards them. For example if you are a sports brand with a segment of 18-40 year olds based in Manhattan with an interest in sport you can send them ads about a new activewear line for young people that is about to launch in New York. And though this is much more effective than just blanket targeting everyone with ads, but it doesn’t give us the full picture about our customers.

E-commerce is a booming industry. Last year worldwide sales reached nearly 2 trillion USD. If you have a product or service to sell, e-commerce is an increasingly popular option and often preferred to brick-and-mortar stores. And even if you have a brick-and-mortar store, e-commerce is a great way to reach more customers and minimize expenses online, in addition to your on-the-ground business. But though it may be cheaper than physically renting a store and bulk buying materials, e-commerce comes with its own challenges.

Some of the biggest challenges in e-commerce focus on converting traffic to sales. If you have a great website, amazing UX and are managing to get visitors to your site, that doesn’t guarantee that those visitors will buy. And along the purchasing process, there are some key places that people tend to get lost. One of the biggest issues is shopping cart abandonment. It’s estimated that online stores lose roughly 67% of sales due to shopping cart abandonment, and it can happen for a number of reasons. A major problem is issues with the UX, an overly long or complex process, or simply adding hidden fees and costs later on in the process.

In this blog we will focus on some great tips from bigcommerce.com that can help you improve your sales. For the full article from bigcommerce.com, click here.

Before you delve into solutions and improvements, it is important to fully understand what the main problems on your online store are. Every business is different and there is no better way to understand conversion rates than consistently track and monitor them. Some great ways to do this are by using online tools such as Inspectlet, Mixpanel or CrazyEgg. These types of tools can give you detailed information on user sessions, clicks and more. It’s also a good idea to start out with Google Analytics so you can easily track visitor data like how many visitors actually convert and how long they stay on your site. If you use BigCommerce, you will see that they have their very own built-in analytics solution that allows you to easily track details on shopping cart abandonment. Once you see where the key problems are, you can better focus on solving them.

User-generated content or UGC is crucial for creating buzz around your business. In fact, consumer reviews are trusted 12 times more than marketing or descriptions that come from brands themselves. The big difference between traditional advertising and reviews is authenticity. Reading a customer review is that much more convincing because you know the person who wrote the review is not an employee or advertising executive; they are another user who is genuinely excited over the brand and what it has to offer. Of course, authenticity relies on the fact that your reviews are real. So, if a user suspects fake reviews, the overall effectiveness will be lower.

If you have a Wix website and are looking to grow your business – you are in luck. Heyoya has just launched its game-changing voice and text comments and reviews platform on Wix. The Heyoya widget can be easily added to your online store or content site and allows your users to communicate with each other through unique 30-second voice snippets. This means your readers, users, and customers can easily share their thoughts and opinions on your website. Heyoya also lets you record product pitches, special offers and responses to user comments.